The 2020 census will attempt to collect personal information from more than 300 million people across the country. But a government watchdog report released this month has concerns about the U.S. Census Bureau’s ability to do that.
This year’s census is the first where it will be mostly conducted online.
“It’s ripe for both direct attacks from hackers around the world to try to understand the U.S. population,” says Brendan Saltaformaggio, a professor at Georgia Tech. “And it’s also a big risk to just regular people because it poses a nice way of trying to trick people into giving away information the census wouldn’t normally ask for.”
One of his concerns is phishing emails that ask people for sensitive information.
The 2020 census will not email you or ask for your Social Security number and bank/credit account information. It will also not ask you for money or for anything on behalf of a political campaign.
One of the issues the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s report is worried about is the Bureau’s ability to recover lost data if there’s a cyberattack.
Saltaformaggio says the types of cyberattacks that can happen are varied. A possible one could include misrepresenting the population of a city or a town.
“On the surface, what sense would it make for an attacker to misrepresent the population of a city?” he says. “But maybe that’s a very targeted attack with real ramifications. It changes the way we do politics here in the United States.”
The census decides the number of seats a state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives. The count also determines redistricting, or how states draw legislative districts.
“The Census Bureau has successfully tested its data collection systems and has built backup systems to support its resilient operations,” said Steven Dillingham, director of the Census Bureau, in a statement to the media this month. “Both our primary and backup internet response systems have been fully tested and field tested. We are ready to receive responses from all around the country in March.”
Despite launching a $500 million ad campaign to get the word out about the count, the Census Bureau may have a hard time getting people to fill out the questionnaire due to lack of trust.
A report this month by the Urban Institute states that nearly one-third of adults are concerned about how their answers to the 2020 census questionnaire will be used and how it will be shared.
The Census Bureau cannot share data that identifies individuals until 72 years after it’s been collected. Census employees take a lifetime oath to protect personal data.
“And the penalties for violating that are quite steep,” says Beth Jarosz, senior research associate at the Population Reference Bureau. The organization is not affiliated with the Census Bureau. “We’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and years in jail for any person who violates the oath that they’ve taken to protect census data,” she says.
However, the Census Bureau can share demographic data down to the neighborhood level.
Jarosz says it’s always been the case that the bureau took steps to protect residents’ data. For this year’s census, a new layer of security, called differential privacy, has been added. This process “injects noise” into data so that individuals cannot be re-identified by combining census data and other publicly available data.
“Differential privacy is a way of protecting the original data by changing the individual tabulations just a little bit,” Jarosz says.
An example she gives is if there are three men and four women in a census tract. The data could be flipped so that there would be two men and five women. The noise is randomly added, Jarosz says, so there’s no way to find out what the original data was.
“I think the Census Bureau has sort of a challenge of trying to walk that tightrope between protecting privacy and protecting the confidentiality of responses and also providing accurate data to make sure decision makers and the public and people who are doing redistricting have the information they need,” Jarosz says.
Most households will receive mailers to fill out the census in March. The census can also be taken by phone or paper questionnaire. Information the census will ask for includes, name, telephone number age, sex and race/ethnicity.
